How would you like to exchange your life for theirs? How would you like to spend your days without showing your face to the light of the sun? How would you like to go about in a great bag of black silk tied in at the waist so that it covers your form from the head to the feet except for a short, thick veil of black through the meshes of which you can just feel your way along the street?
How would you like to be penned up in the back of your house, or to have your front windows so latticed that you could see out only through holes as big around as a lead pencil? Aye, more, how would you like never to talk to any man but one of your own family, and worse, never even to be seen by any other man or boy?
This is the condition of the girls of this fanatical city of Damascus. It is the fate of millions of other women of the Mohammedan world.
Within the past thirty years I have visited every Moslem country on earth, and have worn out my eyes trying to see through the veils which hide the fair sex. In Morocco their faces are covered with cotton, and they peep out through the crack made by pulling the cloth slightly apart in front of the face. In Kairouan the girls cover their faces with black crêpe so thick that you cannot tell whether they are negroes or whites; and in Tunis they are so shrouded in balloon-like robes as hardly to be able to walk. In Zanzibar the girls wear bags which cover them to the feet, and their only view of the world is through peepholes as big as a fifty-cent piece hedged across with lace netting so that no man shall see in. In Egypt the headdress comes down to the eyebrows, and a veil extends from there to the knees, with the exception of a crack for the eyes, the crack being kept open by a gold or brass spool resting on the bridge of the nose. In Constantinople the fashionable Turks are doing away with the veil or using thin white gauze through which the face can be plainly seen. It is thus that the ladies of the harem of the Sultan are dressed, and thus the wives of all the rich men.
Here in Damascus the women stick to veils of flowered muslin or black crêpe and wrap themselves in great billowy cloaks of black silk or calico. These bulge out above and below where they are tied at the waist, making each maiden look like two huge lumps of sausages. Every time I go through the city I see hundreds of them waddling along. They throng the bazaars, where they bob back and forth as they talk with the merchants. They may be seen picking their way through the side streets or sitting on the floors of the mosques reading the Koran and watching the men go through their prayers. Many of the shrouded figures are those of small girls. They take the veil at eleven or twelve and keep it on after marriage and indeed until death.
The street-dress of the woman of Damascus is a bag of black silk tied in at the waist and a black veil so thick that she can hardly see her way about. Feminism and style-changes make little headway in Moslem lands
I am five feet eight inches tall but could not reach to the upper edge of this fragment of one of the giant columns at Baalbek. Once a centre of worship of Baal, there were built later temples to Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, and Bacchus
And then the houses! All of the Mohammedans have homes so latticed that the women cannot be seen from the streets. In some cases the windows are built over the sidewalks, hanging out like cages of wooden network. This is true even in the new apartment houses which are now going up, as well as in the huts of the poor, although the latter seldom have windows except at the back. The ordinary lattice is made of canelike rushes or sticks, and preparing them is a special trade followed by many. The rushes are brought in to Damascus on the backs of donkeys, which as they go fill the streets with their loads.